Early in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, the socially omniscient Charles Bowen remarks of the protagonist Undine Spragg: “… she’s a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph.” Undine’s ascent via marriage from small town to the echelons of New York is both harbinger of destruction to a society so petrified in their ways as to be an insect in amber and unstoppable trajectory fixed upon nothing but what exists in the moment.